So the Local Radio Fairness Act is purely an act of picking winners and losers, a corrupt means of trying to curry favor with local media stations, come re-election time. I normally hate arguments like that but look, what legitimate reason is there to hand out copyright exemptions?

No industry should ever get special privileges in this country. That’s picking winners and losers at a basic level. Radio gets a cutout, and it should be ended. Copyright is copyright. Just ask any freelancer what having your stuff given away for free, in exchange for ‘exposure,’ is really worth.

Picking winners and losers in the marketplace is a common theme in the Obama era, and Republicans want to put a stop to it. Marsha Blackburn has a bill to quit picking favorites in Radio and close up some copyright ‘loopholes’ (really just favoritism) in the current law. Meanwhile efforts are underway to block Obama’s plan to regulate the Internet misleadingly named ‘Net Neutrality’.

The future of the GOP is in anti-cronyist shifts in policy that favor free markets, not specific companies or industries. This is one important way we can demonstrate to the American people that small government is for the little guy, and big government is for the big, well-connected guy. One way to do this is to defeat the Local Radio Freedom Act, which is a | Read More »

The original founders of the Pirate Bay, the Internet’s largest copyright infringement ring, used to brag about how they were technically obeying Swedish law. Well, Swedish law changed to close up the technicality they were using – they were facilitating mass copyright infringement, specifically of works by name, without hosting the bits themselves – and the founders were arrested and convicted. The new owners thought | Read More »

If I write a video game, and launch a server to host it, I’m spending money, putting it at risk, in the hopes that it will be an investment that makes me profit. The Constitution recognizes this is a good thing, and so gives me copyright protection over my works.

Conservatives often talk about how government picks winners and losers, but sometimes it’s important to discuss just how that is done. It’s easy to see in cases like Solyndra where government picks winners, but sometimes it’s harder to see when government is making one industry win at the expense of another.

Laws related to technology are full of examples like that, and tonight I’m going to illustrate two important ways government makes broadcasters winners at the expense of cable companies and content producers.

I know, I’m late again. Turns out after being sick my body’s just been exhausted recovering. We’ll be better off next week.

Ajit Pai came to RedState on Friday to tell us about the Zapple Doctrine was being used by the FCC to stifle freedom of speech, specifically to try to hinder Scott Walker. The Zapple Doctrine is now dead, but we need to check the FCC to keep it from returning.

When new FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler announced plans for a new Net Neutrality order, I wasn’t surprised. Despite having lost in court twice, first in Comcast v FCC and then in Verizon v FCC, the radicals weren’t going to give up on this. They were going to try a third time. And we knew he was a radical once he hired Gigi Sohn.

So now Wheeler is in a fight with the radicals that may or may not be real. Remember last time the radicals insisted nothing short of Title II Classification (a dramatic step that literally would regulate Internet the same as phones), when guess what? Even Title II allows fast lanes.

So it’s all just a smokescreen. They want all the government they can get.

Will the Obama FCC dance to the tune set by the furthest left wing of the President’s party, in an election year where the electorate is going to be much further to the right than the one that re-elected the President?

Today is a big day in Congress for the cable and satellite (MVPDs) war on broadcast television stations. The House Judiciary Committee is holding a hearing on the compulsory licenses for broadcast television programming in the Copyright Act, and the House Energy and Commerce Committee is voting on a bill to reauthorize “STELA” (the compulsory copyright license for the retransmission of distant broadcast signals by satellite operators). | Read More »

I’ve taken some criticism for saying over and over again in this space, that kids don’t belong on the Internet (unsupervised and uncontrolled really), and that classrooms should not have Internet access introduced. The basic problem is that unfettered Internet access brings bullies and predators to kids. It also means pornography will just keep popping up, and there’s no way to fix that with these uncontrolled environments. It’s just not worth the risks.

Have you quit using Mozilla Firefox yet? It’s time to switch, yet again, as Mozilla has taken an extremist political position for no real reason except that the project has been completely hijacked by radical ideologues. Not only are they for zombie Net Neutrality, they’re claiming the Obama FCC isn’t going far enough. Lunacy.

Barack Obama showed weakness when he even floated the possibility that America would turn our control of ICANN over to other countries. Down in Brazil they’re all over that idea (the anarchists are claiming they want a non-governmental control, but look, in a world with Russia and China, and even the EU countries like Germany having ‘national champions’, that’s not happening). India’s game, too. Republicans, and heck it’d help if Democrats did it to, must signal that the next President will not let this happen.